The windows through which we see wonderful things

Category Archives: magic

My original interlocutor made a comment on my last piece, so we have some more to go on this week! Pontifus’s original question (which, shamefully, I have not even approached answering), was about the connection between magic as practice and magic as plot device. Specifically, magic as practice is the use of metaphor et al to reconstruct oneself, the world, and everything else. Magic as plot device is a way to produce a metaphor for something else. Therefore, highly systematized fictional magics are pointless if not actively stupid, since they systematize what’s meant to be interpreted.

I’m fulfilling requests now, in a way. Pontifus has asked me about the difference between magic in theory and practice and magic as found in fiction of all sorts, particularly when it’s a plot device. My knee-jerk answer was that there doesn’t have to be an effective difference, but there does usually seem to be. So here’s another of those exploratory posts I know you love so much.

Hopefully you enjoyed Thanksgiving if you’re in America or an American elsewhere. If you’re not one of those things, you could have eaten way too much food last Thursday anyway, no one would have blamed you. What I’m saying, basically, is that Thanksgiving makes us all American, like St. Patrick’s Day makes us all Irish.

OK, all right, moving on. Have you heard of Alan Moore? I bet you have. He has an amazing beard, a history of being angry at companies, and oh yeah he wrote Watchmen. I once horrified a professor by saying I thought Watchmen was good, but kinda dated and not really the greatest comic book ever written — something the professor said unironically. It doesn’t help that I like Promethea waaaaayy more. So let’s talk about that comic instead!

Let’s keep with the comic book theme, hey? Ever heard of Hellboy? Of course you have, you have the internet. But if you haven’t, he’s a demon from hell (well, A hell) sent to Earth to destroy it, who is instead adopted by a kindly scholar and the US military, fed pancakes, and who grows up to be a good, taciturn guy who punches vampires to death. And Nazis, he punches them too.

It’s been a while since I wrote about poetry or songs, so let’s try that out. Have you ever listened to Dio? In general, I mean. It would help if you’d listened to “Rainbow in the Dark” or “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” but, I mean, altogether, man. I said when I first started listening to Dio that I wished I had found out about him when I was fifteen, because shit, that would have been fucking awesome. As it is, it’s still pretty fucking great.